Students who stutter think that their college professors perceive them less positively than students who don’t stutter

 

How do students who stutter (and those who don’t) think that their college professors perceive them? The March 2021 issue of the Journal of Fluency Disorders contains an article by Danielle Werle and Courtney T. Byrd titled College professors’ perception of students who stutter and the impact on comfort approaching professors. They surveyed 246 adult students, half who stuttered and the other half who did not. Participants were asked to rank how they believed professors perceived them regarding sixteen traits on a scale ranging from zero to one hundred. Seven traits are positive: Bold, Bright, Calm, Competent, Intelligent, Open, Self-Assured. The other nine traits are negative: Aggressive, Dull, Incompetent, Mediocre, Nervous, Passive, Reticent, Self-conscious, Shy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2 of the article listed the ranks for sixteen traits, as shown above in alphabetical order via a bar chart. For six traits indicated by asterisks (Incompetent, Nervous, Open, Self-assured, Self-conscious, and Shy) there were statistically significant differences between stutterers and non-stutterers. Four of those traits (Incompetent, Nervous, Self-conscious, and Shy)  are negative, and stutterers had higher rankings than non-stutterers. The other two, Open and Self-assured are positive and non-stutterers had higher rankings than stutterers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second bar chart plots the differences in rank (stutterers minus non-stutterers). They rank as follows: Nervous* 21.41, Shy* 21.04, Self-conscious* 20.97, Reticent* 11.48, Incompetent* 10.55, Dull 7.54, Passive 6.07, Mediocre 4.87, Intelligent 1.09, Aggressive 1.06, Bright -1.33, Bold -4.67, Calm -9.92, Competent -10.6, Open* -13.31, Self-assured* -17.93. For Competent and Incompetent the absolute value of the difference is almost identical.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The choice of traits for this survey has an obvious flaw. The analysis did not compare two obvious opposites – Competent and Incompetent. Examination of the bar chart reveals other sets of opposites (as indicated above): Aggressive and Passive, Bold and Shy, Bright and Dull or Intelligent , Calm and Nervous, Competent and Incompetent, and Self-Assured or Self-Conscious. An obvious way to do this is by flipping the scale over to compare Competent versus [100 – Incompetent]. A third bar chart shows the six sets of opposite traits together. There really are just nine independent traits. I found those sets described in a 2007 article in the Journal of Fluency Disorders (Volume 32, pages 297 to 309) by Sean P. MacKinnon et al that is titled Origins of the stuttering stereotype: Stereotype formation through anchoring adjustment. Their Table 1 has 25 items on semantic differential scales, including aggressive-passive, shy-bold, intelligent-dull, nervous-calm, and self-conscious – self-assured (but not competent -incompetent).

 

 What about impact on comfort when approaching professors? All students were asked a Yes/No question – whether they felt comfortable approaching their professor to discuss their performance on oral presentations. (Those who stutter also were asked some other questions). A logistic regression model for that Yes/No question found only the trait Self-assured had a significant coefficient for prediction. Their results section mentioned testing from the statistical problem of multicollinearity (when two related variables both are competing to predict a result). But that problem instead needed to be discussed back when the questions were chosen.

 

Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s new nickname is ‘Cancun Ted’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Based on his resume you might expect that Ted Cruz wouldn’t do something very stupid and completely tone deaf. He graduated from Princeton and then Harvard Law School, clerked for William Rehnqiust ( Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court),  Chief and was elected as a U.S. Senator representing Texas in 2012 and 2018.  

 

But an article by Jessica Lee at Snopes on February 18, 2021 is titled Did Ted Cruz fly to Cancun during Texas energy crisis? Unfortunately the answer is TRUE. A second article by Dan Godwin at Fox4News on February 19, 2021 is titled Sen. Ted Cruz returns home, says Cancun trip during Texas’ deadly winter power crisis a mistake . And a third article by Leonard Greene at the New York Daily News on February 19, 2021 is titled ‘Good dad,’ bad senator: Cowardly Ted Cruz blames Cancun caper on his daughters. Worse still, a fourth article by Susan Milligan at US News on February 19, 2020 titled Ted Cruz’s crisis of crisis management opens by stating:

 

“The first rule of politics is, don’t abandon your constituents in a crisis – and in particular don’t tend to your own personal comfort while people who decide whether you keep your job are suffering.”

 

I think his nickname will stick. The image was adapted from a cartoon in a 1918 book by Fontaine Fox titled Cartoons Second Book at the Internet Archive.

 

Five tips for building an informative speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some excellent recent articles about public speaking hidden in magazines you likely never have ever heard of (or seen). But you can find the full-text for them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database from the U. S. National Library of Medicine, which has 6.7 million articles. When I searched there under PowerPoint I found a humongous haystack with 10,793 articles. Searching under lecturing resulted in a smaller haystack with 7,1122 articles. Searching for PowerPoint AND lecturing reduced that down to a manageable 280. Then I sorted them by Pub Date to show the most recent first.

 

The 52nd article on that list is by Eric Steinberg and Doug Franzen and is titled Five tips for building a successful didactic talk. It appears in AEM (Academic Emergency Medicine) Education and Training in 2020, Volume 4, Number 1, on pages 72 to 74. Sections in it are titled:

 

Passion + Purpose = Engagement

Know Your Audience

Bones and Flesh

Pictures Speak 1,000 Words, Your Text Shouldn’t

Practice Makes Perfect

 

‘Didactic’? But I don’t want to ‘die.’ The title of that article refers to a ‘didactic talk’, which is something I instead would have called an informative or informational speech (a speech to teach).  I learned about that topic a decade ago from a Toastmasters advanced manual titled Speaking to Inform. The article by Steinberg and Franzen references another by Danielle Ofri titled The passion and the peril: storytelling in medicine which you can find at the web site for Academic Medicine.

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons showing a Guy presenting a business graph.

 

How to present with confidence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some excellent recent articles about public speaking hidden in magazines you likely never have ever heard of (or seen). But you can find the full-text for them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database from the U. S. National Library of Medicine, which has 6.7 million articles. When I searched there under the phrase “public speaking” I found a gigantic haystack with 3502 articles, which I sorted by Pub Date to show the most recent first. Adding the word PowerPoint reduced that down to a manageable 86.

 

Yesterday I blogged about the first article on that list, in a post titled Giving an Effective Medical Lecture. Today I will discuss the 23rd article which is by Wendy H. Vogel and Pamela Hallquist Viale and is titled Presenting with Confidence. It appears in the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology on July-August 2018 Volume 9, No. 5. Pages 545 to 548. 

 

Sections in it are titled:

 

Fear of Public Speaking

High-Level Tips

Developing Slides

Keeping the Audience’s Interest

Conclusion

 

Tables are titled:

 

Tips for giving a bad presentation

What to know about your audience

Examples of impactful openings

PowerPoint tips

Handling questions from your audience

Resources for presenters

 

Under High Level Tips they mention:

 

“The first tip is to know your subject and know it well. In fact, should your audio-visual equipment malfunction (and if you speak often enough, this is likely to happen), you should have your presentation memorized. However, it is a good idea to make a hard copy of your slides and use them in case of equipment failure.”

 

But I don’t think you ever should try to memorize (word for word). After an equipment malfunction you will have less than the expected time to present, and need to be able to adapt on the fly.  

    

The image was adapted from a cartoon at Wikimedia Commons about a businesswoman presenting a line graph.

 

Giving an effective medical lecture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are there excellent recent articles about speaking - in magazines you probably never have seen? Yes, there are. You can find and read them for free in the PubMed Central (PMC) database with 6.7 million articles. That database is by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. I did a search for the phrase “public speaking” and found 3502 articles. Adding AND PowerPoint reduced that list to 86 articles, which I could sort by Pub Date to see the most recent. The first article is by Robert C. Lowe and Steven C. Borkan. It is in the January 12, 2021 issue of Medical Science Educator and is titled Effective Medical Lecturing: Practice Becomes Theory. The .pdf version is nine pages and has thirty references.

 

Section headings are:

The Challenge

The Great Lecture

Lecture Time Management

How to Plan Lecture Content

De-emphasizing the Teacher

Audience as the Educational Target

Nuts and Bolts of Preparing PowerPoint Slides

Point by Point

Plot Unfolds

Stage Presence and Delivery

Engagement

Conclusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under Point by Point, Figure 4 discusses ineffective versus effective slides, as is shown above (in my version).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Figure 1 gives a specific example of an ineffective and an effective slide, as is shown above (in my version).  

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons of a Serious Cartoon Guy Discussing a Line Graph.

 

 

Is everyone afraid (or nervous or anxious) when speaking in public?

 

Of course not! But every so often someone tries to tell us that. For example, a blog post on January 18, 2021 by Peter George at PeterGeorgePublicSpeaking titled How to tame your nerves when speaking in public says that:

 

“Every presenter - novice and veteran alike - gets nervous when speaking in front of others.”    

 

Similarly, another blog post on January 30, 2021 by Maurice DeCastro at Mindful Presenter titled Public speaking: 5 ways mindfulness can help claims:

 

“Everyone feels some level of anxiety when presenting and speaking in public. Many people feel extremely nervous; even to the point of experiencing panic attacks.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s look at some survey results to check these claims. There is a Chapman Survey of American Fears which is done annually. You can find results for six of them from 2014 to 2019. They asked “How afraid are you of public speaking?” with a choice of four levels: Not Afraid, Slightly Afraid, Afraid, Very Afraid. Results for Not Afraid are shown above in a table. 34.1%  to 41.4% were Not Afraid, with a mean of 38.0%. So roughly two out of five adults had no fear whatsoever.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for Very Afraid are shown in another table. Just 8.8%  to 12.8% were Very Afraid, with a mean of 10.4 %. So roughly one out of ten adults were very afraid. That’s not very many people.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How did  both coaches, Mr. George and Mr. DeCastro, instead decide everyone was afraid? Perhaps it is due to selection bias. As shown above in a Venn diagram, if only some of those with a fear ask for coaching, then selection bias will lead to a false impression. (Way back on August 26, 2011 I blogged about Selection bias and presented a different Venn diagram). On September 19, 2019 I also blogged about how Fear of public speaking doesn’t happen to everybody - or all the time.

 

Playing with words: PRE- or POST-?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 20, 2018 I blogged about Playing with words: PRO or CON? For next week’s meeting of my Toastmasters club I am the Grammarian and need to introduce a vocabulary Word of the Week. That word is concise. But procise isn’t a real word for its opposite. Similarly we can take a playful look at the prefixes for before (PRE-) and after (POST-).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English isn’t symmetrical. As shown above in a table of pairs where real words are green and unreal ones are red, it is not common for there to be words beginning with both prefixes. Two exceptions are preposition and postposition (with the latter being obscure) & premature and postmature (with the latter an uncommon medical term).

 

Why do they call it postage? You have to put the stamp on a letter before you can mail it. (It’s not preage). Language can be precise, but it isn’t postcise. You can prefer something, but don’t postfer it. When you give a speech, you present, but later don’t postsent. Your backside is your posterior. But the opposite of posterior is not preerior, it’s anterior (which I learned as medical terminology).